shipped God in
Westminster Abbey. As he strolled among the tombs, he came, at last,
to the grave of two men who had often roused his enthusiasm. He
stopped, and spoke:

"I will not say, Take off your shoes, for the ground on
which you stand is holy; but, look, sir, do you see those
simple letters on the flagstones beneath your feet,--W.P.
and C.J.F. Here lie, side by side, the remains of the two
great rivals, Pitt and Fox, whose memory so completely lives
in history. No marble monuments are necessary to mark the
spot where _their_ bodies repose. There is more simple
grandeur in those few letters than in all the surrounding
monuments, sir."

How more than English was all this! England had been growing away from
and beyond Westminster Abbey, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox; but
this Virginia Englishman, living alone in his woods, with his slaves
and his overseers, severed from the progressive life of his race, was
living still in the days when a pair of dissolute young orators could
be deemed, and with some reason too, the most important persons in a
great empire. A friend asked him how he was pleased with England. He
answered with enthusiasm,--

"There never was such a country on the face of the earth as
England, and it is utterly impossible that there can be any
combination of circumstances hereafter to make such another
country as Old England now is!"

We ought not to have been surprised at the sympathy which the English
Tories felt during the late war for their brethren in the Southern
States of America. It was as natural as it was for the English
Protestants to welcome the banished Huguenots. It was as natural as it
was for Louis XIV. to give an asylum to the Stuarts. The traveller who
should have gone, seven years ago, straight from an English
agricultural county to a cotton district of South Carolina, or a
tobacco county of Virginia, would have felt that the differences
between the two places were merely external. The system in both places
and the spirit of both were strikingly similar. In the old parts of
Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, you had only to get
ten miles from a railroad to find yourself among people who were
English in their feelings, opinions, habits, and even in their accent.
New England differs from Old England, because New England has grown:
Virginia was English, because she had been stationary. Happening t